


Local Medical Abomination Mind-bonded to A Drunk, Scaly Wallflower; They Fight Sea Monsters, News@11

by bmouse



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-27
Updated: 2016-08-27
Packaged: 2018-08-11 10:30:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7887760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bmouse/pseuds/bmouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some atmospheric Pacific Rim AU nonsense.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Local Medical Abomination Mind-bonded to A Drunk, Scaly Wallflower; They Fight Sea Monsters, News@11

**Author's Note:**

> Ok the thing is for this DS9/Pacific Rim Fusion thing to truly work out all of the Star Trek universe is now compressed into just one hella large planet, with a shitton of little continent clusters to mimic the various sectors of space where each species lives.  
> Cardassia is just about where Australia is, except they’ve got some British Empire-style bad blood going on with Bajor, which they invaded and colonized at some point but then had to GTFO.  
> The Dominion(quelle surprise, they’re totes behind this Kaiju bullshit) is on the other side of the deep sea dimensional rift.
> 
> Yes I know this is way too much backstory for a ficlet, don’t look at me. I have like 15k of an abandoned PacificRim AU in my WIP folder and this was the only bit that stood on its own so here u go.

Halfway through the party Julian, through a slight sympathetic buzz and bubbling of his own bloodstream, noticed that though Garak wasn't _drunk_ yet he was becoming a trifle affected. After their latest tooth-and-nails victory Ziyal had ventured into the city’s Little Cardassia and gotten Garak a bottle of Orange Kanar. The vintage had not been distinguished exactly, but it _was_ fresh from the Homeland and apparently very much alive and kicking. And Garak had been taking delicate, serpentine sips of it since early afternoon.

Famously paranoid as he was, Garak never accepted consumables. Everyone in the Federation-christened Dome-Seabase 9 knew that by now. When he’d publicly declined Keiko’s famous scones in the cafeteria his face had been arranged into true regret (possibly by a good bit of acting, Julian still wasn’t sure if Cardassian digestive systems appreciated raisins) but nothing could get him to reconsider. 

In the case of Ziyal’s cheap kanar however, Garak had gone through an entire arcane array of swipes and scans and spectrometers in his corner of their laboratory, and after they all had failed to yield any hints of danger, he had dramatically taken the bottle to his quarters and poured himself an inch. Julian had found him like that, with a paper book open on his lap, staring unnervingly into the glass, and half-jokingly offered his own services as a last-tier test taster.

Garak had been very touched but declined, saying that it would be more culturally appropriate to take the consequences himself, explaining that this usually benign risk was an essential part of the Cardassian gift-giving process. Julian had been very happy to learn yet another thing about his co-pilot’s culture but in the end he still went back to his quarters and assembled a small valise of anti-poison hypos. Just in case.

In a twist of luck (honestly due to them after their last dragging, hell-bent disaster of a Kaiju skirmish) Garak lived through his first sip and then, the next several refills. Consequently, it had been easier than usual to get him to come with Julian to the victory party on the upper levels.

So now they’d both been here for a while, with varying degrees of actual engagement. 

Julian for example, had just gently extracted himself from the clutches of an independent Andorian frontline reporter. He'd been flattered by their initial eagerness to jump into a conversation (which had quickly become an informal interview) in a sort of bemused, bittersweet way. Years ago, when he still had illusions of being a prominent practicing physician Julian had dreamed of being interviewed, of having articles with little square holos of his face scrolling through people’s consoles. Now he was in the newsfeeds under an entirely different subheading.

That had taken some getting used to. At first he’d simply been terrified of being outed to the press. Then it had been perversely, a little thrilling to have both the Fleet’s official protection as Important World-Saving personnel and some of his partner’s implied danger rubbed off on him. 

Then Garak had begun infecting him by small insidious degrees, or probably just amplifying the parts of Julian that slotted all too easily into the matching hooks of his own character. Either way and he found himself having too much fun being the public face of their partnership; acting even more naive and optimistic than he’d ever been, just to play with people's expectations. That had been more or less his modus operandi for this exchange, and part of him delighted in the Andorian reporter’s frustration. 

They’d come here hoping for a glimpse of his supposedly ‘corrupted’ soul, for Fleet ideals fallen to battle fatigue and serpentine ambition, for a hint of Khan Noonien Singh. Instead they got Julian Bashir - blithe blinker of eyelashes and a sunny broken record in favor of ‘inter-cultural cooperation and understanding.’

But in the end, a spoonful of the frustration was his. The traps he’d side-stepped were the same ones he’d seen in interviews time and time before, and several of the reporter’s lines of inquiry smacked of outright specism. Yes Andoria was on the other side of the globe from the continental seat of Cardassia’s warm, arid, and rather diminished empire, but that was no excuse for ignorance. 

It was even more annoying how everyone assumed his pilot-bond with Garak was strictly platonic. Giant monsters rising from an abyssal dimensional rift to destroy the planet was the order of the day, but a Cardassian and a sort-of-Human willingly going to bed was apparently inconceivable. It was enough to make one roll one’s tongue to the roof of one’s mouth and make irate little ct’sk ct’sk -ing sounds. Except no one but Garak would get the reference.

Speaking of Garak, Julian eventually found him on a loveseat in a corner, nigh-on blended into it. He was wearing a green long-sleeved shirt that could have almost been human-make(only the texture and subtle hexagonal weave betraying the Cardassian fabric) black formal slacks and buffed black leather shoes. Objectively none of this made him look any less alien, no cut of shirt existed that could hide all the scales, but he was doing some version of the ‘notice me not’ protocol that let him pop up behind Chief O’Brien in Ops meetings and so Julian wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that someone had tried to sit on him in the meantime.

With a subtle movement Garak made space for him where before there hadn’t seemed to be any.

Julian sat down, immediately feeling an internal hum of satisfaction as he discreetly slotted their ankles together. Their high sync-rate meant that velcroing( the old slang for maintaining casual physical contact between co-pilots) was a constant temptation between them. From the Drift he knew Garak appreciated these small touches first and foremost for their warmth, quite literally, but they were quite illegal and illicit under the every official code of proper Cardassian conduct and Garak _still liked them_ , which gave Julian a clandestine sort of thrill.

“That seemed like a pleasant conversation. Or at least I may trust that your view was pleasant enough to account for any other inadequacies ” said Garak, clearly enunciating every Standard syllable.

With his few data points Julian knew that in Standard Garak came over like a dictionary when he'd been drinking. Even more so than usual, to the point where a native speaker would stumble trying to unravel his sentences. By contrast - in Kardasi his speech became simpler and less formal which was its own sort of intimacy. So far Julian had no idea what he did in Bajoran or Klingon, or Romulan but he had a plan or two for finding out.

"Stimulating, at least.” 

Like a slight shock to the system. Julian had gotten so used to everyone on the base that it had been easy to start pretending that they were the whole world, that maybe they were all castaways thrown together somewhere in outer space and no other society existed. 

After so much of that, new people subconsciously set him a little on edge. Still, he couldn’t resist needling Garak, and it was much easier to do that in the spaces between their Drifts. Next time they had a neural bridge Garak would simply pick all the relevant emotional details of this moment out of his brain, and it would add another layer to the game.

“And good for the ego, certainly. It's nice to have someone from the outside talk to me like I'm a person again.” he added coyly.

 

Known Augment and drift-compatible with a Cardassian had put quite a damper on that initially. Though it was mostly the latter that got him odd looks these days. Augments were less of an automatic horror since they’d been repurposed for the Jaeger Program and Sarina Douglas had saved several cities singlehandedly before she burned out. The hypocrisy of it still grated. Three years ago what his parents had done would have landed him in prison (or a dissection chamber) and now it guaranteed him a job.

"Oh I’m sure.”

Now Garak’s voice didn’t carry even a hint of jealousy, it was as if he’d only been making an observation. And yet.

“You’re ridiculous.” Julian said fondly.

“Then in my ridiculous state, might I beg an escort back to my quarters? It seems I’ve forgotten how plucky a fresh vintage can be.”

Gallantly, (pilots were supposed to be gallant weren’t they? And it was really a shame that a white silk aviator scarf would get hopelessly caught on the flight armor circuitry) he extended Garak a hand to help him off the couch. Playing along Garak reached up to take it, palm gliding surreptitiously against Julian’s own. For a moment the sleeve of his shirt rolled up, exposing the intricate tracery of burns cutting across the scales of his upper forearm and Julian had an urge to place his own body as a thin, inadequate shield between him and the rest of the room.

It really was remarkable, the sympathetic buzz in his nervous system. He hadn’t touched a drop of that kanar but if he concentrated he could taste clove and saffron and fish sauce in his throat, and he could feel his brain losing precision along with any hope of logical detachment. Though if he were honest, Julian probably would have had similarly sentimental thoughts about Garak’s scars while completely sober. 

Escaping the party, they went back down, not quite arm in arm but with the points of their elbows touching.

A necessarily spacious service elevator carried them to the lower levels, which had seemed so dim and sinister to Julian when he’d first arrived at DS9, and now carried a feeling of familiarity, a defensible point of retreat, a space to rest and be unobserved. But some of those were Garak’s feelings, weren’t they? 

Meanwhile his eyes adjusted to the soft array of blue guiding lights, the warm, muted gold that outlined the doorways of the in-use pilot quarters. In this very long corridor, one of the few left untouched and fully Cardassian in the whirlwind of successive Bajoran military and Fleet redecorations, there were now only two. Seeing them, Julian’s traitorously adaptable heart leapt in his chest.

His own feelings were much more straightforward - he was in love, charmed by the stark beauty of the battered old seabase-turned-shatterdome. Perhaps it was simply a side effect of nearly dying here whenever the Kaijuu alarm called them out to fight. Arriving at endearment via Stockholm Syndrome. And yet, there was the sun catching the rainbow flocks of Bajoran seabirds that nested in the upper pylons, and the way the tide sang through the Jager bays. The way he had begun to think of his little room across from Garak’s as a home.

Now there was a maudlin line of thinking. Was his own sentimental spillover to his exiled co-pilot a kindness? Or was it, maybe, a little cruel.

Garak turned in the doorway. The light lingered in his eyes and caught at the micro-scaling of his lips, which curled in a subdued, many-layered smile.

“Since this has become the evening for them, might I propose another indulgence?” he asked, quietly.

Julian turned off the lamps in his quarters before he went across the hall. It wouldn’t do to waste electricity and lately he had realized he was perfectly happy without very much light at all.

 

~

 

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Little Worlds](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7902052) by [sbdrag](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sbdrag/pseuds/sbdrag)




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